Certain For the Dead
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
Summary: The past never dies; few understand that better than Jack Harkness. Twenty years ago, Jack saved a little Welsh boy from the world of 'faeries'. It's only now he discovers he's still paying the ransom. JackIanto
1. HERE AND NOW 1: Intersection

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_**Certain for the Dead** 1/?  
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory_

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_"Death is certain for the born. Rebirth is certain for the dead. You should not grieve for what is unavoidable."_  
-Lord Krishna's advice to Arjuna, Bhagavad-Gita

**HERE AND NOW (I): Intersection**

When all is said and done, it's surprisingly easy for the members of Torchwood Three to leave the Pearce residence. Too easy, Jack knows-- he can feel Gwen thinking it, her gaze a mixture of disgust and reproach as she stares at him, through him. Jasmine's mother is still weeping and, though he knows she has not even begun to fully comprehend her loss, Jack also knows she will survive. Already that small corner of the human mind so dedicated to maintaining sanity is grasping, mercilessly pulling her towards a story she can understand. A case of suburban horror, he imagines. Some bland salaryman snapping, killing the boyfriend and the partygoers. Jasmine ran off into the woods, Ms. Pearce will tell herself, off to her special place, and she just never came back. The Ret-Con will work because she wants it to, so very badly, so badly her mind depends upon it. Jack puts it in a glass of water, touching her shoulder in a somewhat rehearsed gesture of comfort, and his stomach turns violently as she downs it all in one gulp.

And that's all there is to it. The witnesses from the party are all dead; there will be some cleanup work on the death certificates, but it's nothing Owen can't handle in the morning. Right now, his hand still burns from where it touched Ms. Pearce's brightly colored pullover-- all Jack wants to do is go, away, and the whole planet almost feels claustrophobic. Toshiko drives, silent in the face of Owen's token barbs, while Jack sits ramrod straight in the passenger seat. Gwen isn't speaking to him, hasn't said a word since they left the small, seemingly nondescript row house on Plymouth Road. It's a silence Jack savors, even through the anger and resentment it contains, because he knows it will not last long. Gwen is incapable of leaving well enough alone-- hell, it's one of the driving reasons he hired her-- and this case will not prove the exception. Pretty soon, she'll be jumping in with more questions, picking things apart; normally, Jack could meet each thrust with a parry, blocking effortlessly. Now, however, he needs just a moment to collect, to brick back up the memories and emotions that still linger like the ghosts of touch.  
_(Estelle and her fairies; her friendly creatures of rainbow, beautiful as the good in the world she so wanted to believe in. Jasmine's face, blank as china, knowing only a child's love and a child's hate. And the 'faeries' themselves, demanding their chosen, wrathful that Jack would block them again.   
He had felt one brush against him, garbed in memories of Estelle's soft breasts and oriental perfume-- "We will have the human child."  
Jack wanted to be sick, no matter what Gwen thought of him-- he wanted to purge the memories, to take away the voice that had whispered to him alone, "You took from us once. You have the boy-child, and now we will have the girl.")_  
He needed to see Ianto.

A cursory return to headquarters, and the others go out to the pub. Or rather, Owen and Gwen do-- Toshiko slinks off, slippery as a shadow, to decompress in her own way. Jack waits until the Hub is almost silent before earnestly applying himself to the task of getting drunk. He drinks for pleasure, for social reasons, in any number of places, but the Hub is the only location he allows for true intoxication. What is a hub but a center; what is a center but a heart? A heart of steel and wire, all-encompassing and safe in its own cold changlessness. And there was Lisa, a heartless being within a lifeless heart-- and Jack knows he's well on his way towards true inebriation. Such poetic thoughts! But the concepts are like stacking dolls; he follows each line of association without fighting the current. Once, a pretty blond shop-girl had told him he was really a romantic at heart.  
Rose had him pegged from the beginning.

Anyway, it's all connected. Wheels within wheels, he's discovering. Perhaps, if he lives long enough, he'll find that all lines intersect, that nothing happens by chance. Stubbornly, almost religiously, he holds onto a belief in chaos-- he needs it, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. If he ever sees that grand design, he suspects it will make him well and truly mad, so he believes it out of being.  
_("You humans. Look something right in the face and say 'you don't exist', even as its gobbling you up. Bizarre species." The Doctor, of course. The man has a lot to answer for, considering, but Jack intends to ask-- among other things-- how he manages not to get tangled up in his own paradoxes.)_  
Jack pours himself another glass, having settled into something of a rhythm, and contemplates committing suicide tonight. It's just an idle thought for now, but it may solidify as the evening goes on. He can hear footsteps in the level below his office-- a glance out the window reveals a rustle of movement that can only be Ianto, getting Myfanwy her supper. Nothing will be done as long as Ianto is here; Jack loathes the thought of the younger man moping up his blood and gray matter. Ianto has seen enough blood; it would no doubt shock the Welshman, but Jack goes to lengths to spare him when he can.  
_(That otherworldly hiss-- fire and water, earth and air: "Does this one boy mean so much to you? How will you ransom him away?")_

Patiently, Jack waits for Ianto to finish coddling the pterodactyl. It won't be long now-- after everything that has happened, Ianto still hasn't altered his routine in the slightest. Soon, he will be up to give Jack the final report of the evening, vanishing to whatever out-of-the-way corner of the Hub he's claimed for his own. Jack has not actively sought out this refuge, though he knows it is not where Lisa once slept. Toshiko had wanted to keep the Cyber Conversion Unit for study; a request he had almost granted. A sudden, horrible image had occurred to him, a nightmare for a man who rarely slept. In his mind's eye, he had seen Ianto, sleeping in Lisa's steel cradle, like a man buried alive.  
A purely fear-driven thought, and not a rational one-- not something Ianto would ever do.  
_(A boy's voice, so raw and young. And long ago. "The silver girl. I see her and she makes me feel so sad.")_ Jack destroyed the conversion unit the next day.

And there's Ianto, report in one hand, mug of coffee in the other. As reliable as the moon and tide; as deceptive as the serpent in the garden. 'As seductive, too,' Jack thinks, taking in the high cheek bones, the beautiful lines of the Welshman's form. That suit. A temptation in no way overt or intentional-- Ianto was alluring by his very nature. Intelligent and physically beautiful, yes, but also full of feeling, of belief.  
_("How do they choose who they want?" Gwen had asked, puzzling over the faeries. "No one knows," Jack lied.)_ Looking at Ianto, Jack knows exactly what the elementals yearn for. It is the capacity for emotion that draws their eye, an inner silence and chaos. Goodness and malice, selflessness and tyranny. The contradiction that Ianto embodies just standing there, waiting for Jack to summon him across the threshold.   
"What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?" Jack asks. Too familiar again, too soon, but the alcohol makes him want to play fast and loose. He suspects there's a part of himself that wants to be caught out. He wants Ianto to call him on these things, and he pushes for it at the oddest of times. Before Lisa was discovered, Ianto sometimes pushed back, gave a little hope. Was it all for cover? There is no way of knowing, no matter how much Jack searches the other man's face.  
"Evening report, sir," Ianto says, seemingly unmoved by the cheesy reference. "And some coffee, so you'll sober up." A faint hint of something-- regret, disapproval?  
"At least the Doctor was straightforward confusing," Jack mutters. He pours yet another glass, then makes a big show of looking between the bottle and the cup. Eyes locked with Ianto's, he sets the glass aside and chugs deliberately from the bottle. Ianto's sigh is detectable not so much as sound, but as a movement of lips.  
"Beg pardon?"  
"I want to get drunk," Jack says, somewhat childishly. "I just handed a little girl over to an unknown existence amongst some merciless non-humans." More quietly, "I let them have her."  
"So I heard," Ianto replies carefully. There is no clue in his tone as to where this information comes from, but Jack doesn't need it. Gwen had been getting vocal even before Owen pulled her to the lift. For a long moment, the two men simply stare at each other as if separated by a great distance. A real distance, Jack knows, if not a physical one. Something softens fractionally in Ianto's expression-- it's in those deep blue eyes, the set of his mouth. "The report basically details the meteorological changes associated with the..." an almost sheepish pause, "faeries. As you said, there's really no other way of detecting their activity." Ianto crosses the room in a handful of smooth strides, laying the folder neatly along the edge of the desk. With the other hand, he offers the coffee, eyebrow raised. Jack takes the mug silently, allowing their fingers to brush. It is an indulgence-- a very dangerous one at that-- but an almost necessary one as well. Here is Ianto, real and alive, an adult bound by the rules of disbelieving. They can't have him now.  
_("You took from us once. You owe us, One-Called-Jack. You have the boy-child...")_

A thousand words seem to cloy on Jack's tongue. Beneath his fingertips, Ianto's skin is smooth and warm-- he lets the touch linger just a second too long. Ianto starts, flushing little as he takes a step back. Jack wonders where Jasmine is, and if she's happy there... if Ianto would have been happier there.  
'I did it for you,' Jack finds himself wanting to say. Even as he opens his mouth, he isn't sure if the statement applies to Lisa, or to events some twenty years before.  
Ianto says, "Good evening, sir."   
Beat. "Good night, Ianto."  
A hesitant, lingering glance. Then Ianto closes the door, leaving Jack to sip his coffee and curse how many times two paths could cross.


	2. THERE AND THEN 1: Memoria

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_**Certain For the Dead 2/?**  
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory_

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**THERE AND THEN (I): Memoria**

_'If you keep secrets long enough, sometimes they begin to keep you.'_

Ianto Jones was raised with secrets. Suckled on them, his father sometimes said, glancing disdainfully (distrustfully?) at his wife from the corner of his eye. He never could take her straight on. When they fought, it was with stiff backs, facing away from each other with their voices as hard and unforgiving as the bones in their spines. Or, worse still, they fought with silence; a clipped, seemingly innocent phrase fired off like a shot in the dark.  
'Sometimes I just don't know what to do,' Mam would say, and always her hands would be busy, so she would not have to grasp the words. Shelling peas, or mending, keeping household accounts in her neat, odd left hand. 'I just don't know'-- and there would be real sorrow in her voice, though Father couldn't hear it. Wouldn't.  
'Damn it, woman,' he'd say, thick yet somehow skeletal hand coming down in a fist. 'Why can't you ever just say what you mean?' He asked that of Ianto too, as the boy grew. It was, in fact, a question Ianto grew accustomed to. 'But what do you mean by that?' Lisa would ask, throwing her hands up, lacquered nails flashing in the fluorescent light of Torchwood One. How could he explain her what he'd learned so well, so young? Words were only tools; weapons, bridge-builders, flares set off against the night. Sometimes the truth was in the silences between them, in the breath you took before pronouncing a lie.

His mother did not teach him to lie outright. She met his questions head on, as much as possible. He was a curious child, a bright child (she said to his father); she would answer his questions where she could (she promised Ianto himself, stroking his hair as he fell asleep). The lies he learned were the best kind, those of omission-- he learned to lean around questions, to stare blankly, to redirect.  
'Discretion is the better part of valor,' she'd say. Or, 'mouth shut and ears open'. This with her gaze on the ceiling, or looking past her reflection in the mirror; she wasn't speaking to him but to herself, or else some invisible other-presence. Lower lip bitten between her uneven teeth, she'd ball up her fists and scrub at her eyes like a boy trying not to cry. It's only now, through the lens of his experience and memory, that Ianto realizes how very young she was. And how very afraid.

It's hard to figure out where to start things, where to pick up a thread. Ianto developed a sense for what questions would be welcomed, and which would be passed over as if not asked at all. As a result, he has only bits and pieces; bright, translucent mosaic tiles that do not fit edge-to-edge. He thinks his first memory might be of lying against his mother's breast, threading his tiny fingers along the silver of her necklace. She wore a fairy pendant-- a silver affair with stylized wings, and a little shard of blue crystal in its tiny hands. He remembers toying with it while she rocked him, reaching for it as she leaned over his cradle. But these are collections of moments, repeated motions-- not a single memory. She liked to hold him in her lap, or let him sleep next to her in bed-- Father said she was smothering him. Mam said she never asked him for advice on how to raise her son.  
And Ianto was just that-- her son, not Father's. It was always 'do something about your son, Amser' from the elder Mr. Jones, or 'my Ianto' from Mam. One of those things that everyone knew but no one said.

His first concrete memory was of sitting on the cool kitchen floor at night, cross-legged with his mother as they soaked up the warmth of the stove. There was just a little antique light on in the far corner, casting a halo around the dark kitchen-- outside, snow fell against the black Welsh night, and Mam sang him 'happy birthday' over a single golden cupcake. She wasn't only his mother-- she was his coconspirator, as well. A shield; against father from the very beginning, and later against the teachers who thought him too inquisitive, or else too odd.  
'It's natural for a boy to have imaginary friends' she'd wave her hand, brush back a bit of her sensible-short brown hair. 'He doesn't have many playmates of his own age.' She had that way of banishing concern, even as she leaned down close late at night, and whispered to him that he shouldn't believe everything his tree-friends told him. At the time, he assumed she knew everything-- she was Mam, of course she understood it all.

Presently, deep beneath Ianto Jones' waking mind, something stirs. Memory and legend-- those bits of childhood we bury like precious treasure and then forget to dig back up again. He does not remember the tree-friends of his early childhood or, if he does, he discredits them as fantasy, something he concocted for his own entertainment. But there's that look, the one of sudden and complete loss on Mrs. Pearce's face as he does the follow-up confirmation of a successful Ret-Con. An image blazes; Mam, standing by the sink, her face moon-round, hair pulled back in one of those tortoise-shell clips. She's smiling at him, at something his small, child-self has said... but, there! There, in the pale of her skin and the widening of her eyes. She is afraid. She has only half-answers and superstition herself, and she loves Ianto more than anything else on this earth.

The memory sinks back into the endless, waveless reservoir of the unconscious mind, and Ianto is left only with that vague feeling of displacement. Deja'vu, as they say. That little prickle along the hairs of his neck. He feels it all the time, along with a quiver behind his heart, when Jack Harkness smiles at him.

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**TO BE CONTINUED**


	3. HERE AND NOW 2: Sweeter Than

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_**Certain For the Dead 3/?**  
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory_

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**HERE AND NOW (II): Sweeter Than**

Jack doesn't even bother with a cursory search of the Hub. After the others have left, each with the horrors of Brecon Beacons still clinging to them like cloying shadows, he simply heads for Torchwood Three's small but serviceable kitchen. Ianto will be there, he knows; that is, if the Welshman wishes to be found. It is a hiding place only in the broadest sense; if Ianto well and truly wishes to be left alone, he will fold himself away somewhere else. He surfaces so often from shadowy corners, from virtually seamless corridors, that there are days Jack thinks he could tear the Hub apart and still not find the other man. Here Ianto is, just at the right moment, with the right file or the right reminder, or even the right cup of coffee. Always, Jack takes what he offers with hidden gratitude, swallowing down the words on the tip of his tongue. 'Where did you come from?' he wants to ask, because no one can slip under his radar the way Ianto can. A silent ship in a starless sea.  
Of course, broad questions are often the most dangerous, and Jack almost feels it would be rude to ask.

_'And you care so much about manners, Jamie?'_ An airy voice-- half mocking, half fond. One of his creche-sisters? Jack thinks that must be it, just vaguely picturing blond curls and a fashionably pale hand. On the heels of that thought is genuine surprise. On a day to day basis, Jack is far more likely to remember snippets from the past two hundred years than to dredge up thoughts of a childhood that has not, temporally speaking, happened yet. The Beacons had cut along his gut, though, deep enough to scrape bone. It's been a very long time since something has shaken Jack, all the way down to that fathomless void at the base of his spine. More than clutching at his heart, it also ripped at inarticulate, ancient fears, and he can see it reflected in the faces of each member of his team.

Ianto is in the kitchen, sitting at the small, round silver table with his head in his hands. Jack exhales a breath he didn't know he was holding, understanding suddenly that he would have torn the Hub to bits looking for the younger man. It's selfish, he knows; deep down, human beings will always be mammals. There's that instinct, that tingle along the vertebrae that urges retreat in times of stress. Into the bush, into the thickets and bramble, off to some earthy den to lick and tend to wounds. He has not begrudged this from the rest of his team, even though he is almost certain Owen and Gwen are about to make the latest in a long line of irresponsible decisions. Not the workplace romance, but the willful mix of personalities so determined to rip at each other. Gwen loves Rhys, and Owen has yet to really love anyone. Once upon a time, Jack would have thought he'd find it amusing when Harper is finally, irrevocably brought to his knees, but no more.  
_(That sister again, so annoying. "I hope you hit the ground hard, James. I hope it fucking breaks your back." Damn it, Jack thinks back at her, get lost. Back to my murky subconscious, under layers of silt, where you belong.)_

"Ianto," Jack says, not knowing how long he's been standing in the threshold, watching the younger man. Here he is, here he is, he is alive. Pale and shaken, staring aimlessly at his own internal horrors, but alive none the less. If there is a God, he has Jack's sincere thanks.  
"Jack," said on the exhale; a greeting, but also a word containing relief. It draws Jack forward, and he's put his hands on Ianto's tense shoulders before he's truly considered the wisdom of such an action. There's a moment where the younger man is still and cool as cemetery stone, but it flickers away. The muscles relax, and Jack leaves his hands there, looking down at the plate the seems to hold all of Ianto's concentration.   
"Asparagus?" Jack asks, torn between humor and understanding.  
"Left overs from that Italian place," Ianto answers, "it was the only vegetable in the icebox-- I couldn't..."  
"Not after tonight," Harkness confirms, running his hands along Ianto's shoulders and upper arms. As if the other man is cold, or somehow numbed. Perhaps the latter is closer to the truth.  
"I don't think I'll be able to touch meat again, Jack." A bare statement, almost devoid of inflection, but it carries layers of emotions to Jack's ears.  
_('You have to learn how to hear it,' the Doctor had said, standing between Jack and Rose on edge of a singing sea. The waves were almost grapefruit pink, Jack remembers-- populated with an algae that sighed out soprano notes. 'Quiet, concentrate. When you're still, you can feel for it.')_  
"It's going to be all right." Such trite words, but Jack can't help uttering them. He feels naked and disarmed, uncertain if his touch is supposed to comfort Ianto or anchor his own pained consciousness.  
"It has to be," Ianto says, ever one to recognize the difference between empirical truths, and the ones humans force into being. He moves his palms flat against the table's surface, and then into fists. There's no slamming, no physical violence. Instead, Ianto is shaking, shaking so hard it rattles the table. There's a glass of water next to the take-out container, along with Ianto's personal blue-lacquered chopsticks, and two large white pills nestled on a napkin.  
"Not only do you willingly eat asparagus," Jack quips, consciously forming the words, "but you eat them with chopsticks. You know, Mr. Jones, sometimes you're kind of weird."  
Ianto laughs, and offers the barest tilt of a smile. "Yes, sir."

There isn't another chair, so Harkness reluctantly props himself up against the small counter. The room is close quarters-- the table is near enough that, even though he is now facing his companion, Jack can still rest a hand on Ianto's arm. It's a bit awkward, and very obvious, but right now Jack isn't certain he could move his hand even if asked to. Harassment, indeed.  
"Chopsticks are actually very efficient," Ianto says after a long moment. It takes a beat or so for Jack to process the words-- he'd been looking at the deep scratch along the side of his friend's face, and the only coherent thought in his head had been 'sorry, sorry, sorry'. Haphazardly, he grasps for the threads of their meandering conversation.  
"Yeah," he raises an eyebrow. "Provided, of course, that you can figure out how to hold them in first place." A real smile from Ianto, actually lingering; the Welshman picks the sticks up, so deft and elegant, his long fingers cradling them precisely. Such grace is almost obscene, Jack considers privately, full of functional sensuality. He can only stare at the dull shine of those tapering sticks, held with certainty. Ianto has the hands of gifted surgeon, or a violinist.  
_(An artist. He remembers that little boy and his careful drawings, pencils all tucked away by color family.  
"Do you draw what your tree-friends show you?"  
"Sometimes."  
There had been an awful lot of red.)_

'I don't want to think about that,' Jack mutters to his own mind, but it's too late. Another image surfaces-- that terrible cellar, jars like some crazy carnival of flesh. The bastard had even labeled some of them-- 'accountant's heart', 'solicitor's spleen'. Somehow, worst of all, 'lady fingers'. Almost without thinking, he reaches forward to take Ianto's free hand, squeezing tight. The other man's brief humor has fled-- he's staring at his favored hand too, dropping the chopsticks as if numb.  
"Eat something," Jack entreats. "The last thing you had was from that roadside stand, right?" A distracted nod. "You need to take the pills Owen gave you, and you can't do it on an empty stomach."  
"They're sedatives," Ianto says, seemingly to himself. "I really hate pills, sir. I--" A deep breath, "They're too much. I get buried under them. I told Owen that a little bit goes a long way with me, but he wouldn't cut down the dosage. I hate that feeling." Silently, but clearly, the sentence is finished with, 'I hate being out of control.'  
"You took a real beating," Jack says, never the less making a note to consider Ianto's physiology. He'll have words with Owen about being too liberal with the meds. "Tonight, you probably need them."

He's not quite sure what happens next. There's a bit of a disconnect; he's watching Ianto reach for the chopsticks, and then the young Welshman is across the counter at the sink, skin pale as his stomach rebels. Jack crosses over to him, hands once again soothing along Ianto's back. It's dry heaves, he notes-- there really isn't anything in Ianto's stomach to be rejected-- and Jack knows sometimes that's worse. It's as if there's something inside of you that cannot be expelled or purged.  
_('Vomit up your heart and eat it.' Vi-- that was the creche-sister's name. Violet, of the snide remarks and irrational comments written on the bathroom mirror with lipstick or paint. There'd been twenty in his creche-- unusually small-- and most of them had been close. Except for Vi. She was a vicious little thing, and everyone knew it. What happened to her? Jack sifts for a moment, through layers of time and things to come. The Time Agency hired her; an intelligence officer. Or torturer, rather. They said she had a gift.)_  
"She said I tasted sweeter," Ianto says presently. For a moment, Jack thinks he's talking about Vi, and then realizes with some surprise that exhaustion is clouding his mind.  
"Who?" he asks, seized with the sudden desire to raze the Brecon Beacons and its residents to less than ash.

He busies himself hunting in the icebox for juice. Ianto should drink a little juice-- balance the electrolytes. He looks like he's about to fall over. There's some grape juice (is it Toshiko's? oh, well); Jack pours a glass and hands it to his friend. The other man takes it gratefully, indulging small sips without prompting. Jack stands in front of him, hands lax and nervous at his side. One sip, and another; Ianto closes his eyes and takes a few more. Then the glass is back on the counter, and Ianto is in Jack's arms. Jack closes him in easily, making a circle, a fortress, a space.  
"It was his wife-- that woman with the rifle." Ianto's words slide down Jack's neck. "She licked my cheek and said... she said I tasted sweeter than the others. A different breed."  
"She was insane," Jack soothes, discomforted never the less.  
"They kept saying that humans were meat, like they weren't part of our species, like..." Ianto shakes his head against Jack's shoulder. "She said I should know that there are all sorts of creatures writhing under rocks."  
"Whatever humanity they once had was long gone," he affirms. "You're right about that. Everything else is just ravings, Ianto. I've seen a lot of things, things you wouldn't believe, but that was... terrible. I'm sorry you had to see it."  
"Sorry you took the tea boy along?" There's an edge to the tone, aggressive, but Jack recognizes it as self-hatred. He takes Ianto's face in his hands, gentle but firm.  
"Listen to me, Ianto Jones." Eye to eye, almost nose to nose. "You handled an unbelievably fucked up situation to the best of your ability, which is a hell of a lot better than many experienced soldiers. Tosh told me what you did for her. I'm impressed. Or, I will be when I can feel something other than relief that we're out of there." Jack's rueful smile is mirrored on Ianto's face; they step apart, as if on the same cue, suddenly aware of how close they really are. Jack picks up the glass of juice with one hand, snagging the take-out box and chopsticks with the other.

"You can finish this in my office," Jack says to Ianto's questioning look. "I need a drink."  
"These are supposed to knock me out straight off." Ianto is folding the pills up in their napkin, looking uncertain. "I should go---"  
_'To where ever it is you hide when off-duty,'_ Jack finishes in his mind. There is no verbal explanation from the other man, just a meaningful nod. "There's a couch in my office," Jack says, with an effort to be casual. "Sleep there-- it's a nice couch. Leather." Any other time, he would have winked.  
"As I'm aware, sir," Ianto replies-- and there's that hint of amusement, that look that says, _'Honestly, Jack.'_  
Fond exasperation, the captain has heard it called. He slings an arm over Ianto's shoulders and guides him out of the kitchen, flicking off the light.

Ianto is right about the pills. It takes fifteen minutes of slow, careful bites to finish the asparagus, but only two after he swallows he meds. Ianto's eyes close, tumultuous as a winter ocean; he's lax, with his head resting in the crook between the arm and back of the couch. Jack watches him sleep and breathe, both actions shallow and uncertain. The Captain himself drinks, and gazes on Ianto; forces himself to write a report on Brecon Beacons, and watches Ianto. His own mind is drifting into mist, into odd associations and half-awaking nightmares. They're like shell-shock, these dreams, sudden and senseless; he sees the Doctor's hand in the Cannibal's cellar, opens Suzie's autopsy drawer and finds Rose inside. He stands on the edge of the grapefruit sea, and the waves sing a funeral dirge. He dreams he wakes up, that Vi has written Ianto's name in lipstick, all over the glass windows and monitors. She laughing at him, and Lisa is screaming, and Ianto is somewhere (where? where!?) and Jack needs to find him, find him now. Lisa has Ianto in pieces-- she has his heart in a jar.

He jerks awake, to the hyperawareness of a body that needs sleep but has been shocked out of it. A breath, and another. Ianto is still stretched out on the couch-- Jack puts his hand on his chest so he can feel the Welshman breathing. Except, there's something under his hand, between his palm and the loose sweatshirt Ianto is wearing. The hair rises on the back of Jack's neck-- he's going to be sick, he lifts his hand and is assaulted by the smell of hothouse flowers, nauseating and exotic.  
"God, no." It's the last thing he needs, the last thing Ianto needs, but that's when they strike. When you're at your limit, when they can get down into your flesh.

It's a single, red flower petal; just like those stuffed in the mouths of the dead.

"Get the hell out of my Hub," he hisses, taking his antique lighter like a weapon in his hand. He sets the petal on fire, stamps it out on the metal floor, digging his heel into it as if it's a poisonous insect. Cleans up the blackened residue, so Ianto won't ask questions.

On the couch, Ianto shivers and twitches, lost in some dream. Jack covers him with his great coat, self-conscious but tender, and sleeps sitting on the floor with his back propped up against his desk.

* * *

**TO BE CONTINUED**


	4. THERE AND THEN 2: Each Small Piece

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_**Certain For the Dead 4/?**  
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory_

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**THERE AND THEN (II): Each Small Piece**

This is what he knows for certain: He is the son of Vaughn and Amser Jones, both of whom lived in a small Bridgend County village all their lives. Not just their individual lives, but lifelines-- grandmothers and grandfathers, stretching back to where memory became smeared, like a blot of ink on the registry. He was born in the winter of 1983, when his mother was seventeen and his father was... More missing pieces-- he couldn't have been much older than Mam, but no one seems to have bothered to calculate for him. He was a road-hullage man, or boy really; he drove lumber and cattle, food shipments and the occasional drums of chemicals across Wales and back again. Not a member of their small household, but a feared and worrisome guest. You didn't know when he was coming, or when he might go once he came; you could only tiptoe, breath held, around his foreign presence, feeling like a stranger in your own home. When real-life swam back into being, it was always just Ianto and Mam in their small stone house, coming and going and laughing as they pleased.

Secretly, he has already edited this story-- he has bent it to his own means, added his own agenda. The pieces are already frayed, obscured by the motives of others, but he's known all along that you can't tell a story without changing it. Really, he's just the son of Amser Jones, Amser Haydn that was. Already that's a bad place to start, because it begs questions, leaves holes, but what can you do? He works around them as best he can, stitches them up when the opportunity presents itself. Mam was seventeen, still a child herself, when she squatted on the old chestnut bed, sweating in the firelight while the snow fell like a cloak of negative darkness over the world outside. She gave birth to him at home, with only her grandmother-- The Grandmother-- for help. She was a tiny thing, and the going was hard.  
_(How does he know this? It's not part of the story she told him.)_  
And where was Father for all of this? Tradition would put him down stairs, in the kitchen, smoking or doing something else to alleviate the tension, the worry. But really, honestly, he was over at the pub drinking it down like water, muttering and snarling at anyone who came near. Others have told him this-- village mothers, busybodies, offering the words as if he'd asked for them, as if he somehow needed to know. Well, it's hardly a surprise, and at least it completes the picture. Everybody in their places, the players all on the stage. And then Mam takes up the story.

Almost midnight on March 12th, 1983. (_'You narrowly missed the Ides, darling,'_ Lisa used to tease, and at the time he thought it was funny.) Mam and The Grandmother in the upstairs bedroom, waiting. One last push, he's small and perfect, this new little life-- he slides, bloody, into waiting arms and is quiet, quiet. The Grandmother blows in his face, gives his bottom a healthy whack, but... nothing.  
_'Oh, you gave me such a scare,'_ says Mam, years later, cuddling him next to her under the quilts.  
_'You were quiet for so long, eyes open and your face all blue, and finally, finally you screamed.' _  
The baby does scream, and so does Mam-- a whoop of triumph, an exhausted battle cry. Ianto imagines her, pink with sweat, her short hair a dark halo as she falls back, laughing, amidst the soiled sheets. The Grandmother does the cleaning and cutting quickly, while the unnamed boy protests with his new voice. Mam holds out her arms, wiggles her fingers-- _'Give me my boy,'_ she says, _'give him to me now.'_ She's tossed a rag instead, and told to clean herself up. It's cursory, but she follows directions, until at last the Grandmother deems everything in order. Her wrinkled hands surrender the baby to its mother, who coos, _'Come to Mam, Ianto',_ and thus gives him his name.

It was never difficult to get Mam to tell that story, though she mostly preferred others. _(And there were others, seemingly lost to him now, though he hears her sing-songing, "Once when all the world was green and young...")_ Mam never completed Sixth Form...  
-- she was only very narrowly wed properly (said the villagers)  
--she made a drinker out of poor Vaughn (said his family)  
--she always seemed like a nice, quiet girl (said the teachers)  
--and there she was, at seventeen, with a tiny baby and no shame. It's the getting there that's hard to figure; but Ianto does it with determination and quite a bit of hearsay. He knows there was a school dance; there's a photo, Mam in a blue dress with flowers and indigo ribbon, smile so bright as Father leans his form around her, looking pleased. He knows Vaughn was fast boy, a boy who knew his way around.

_(A drizzling, gray Sunday morning. Father is drunk, sitting on the steps; Ianto is fifteen, and Mam is dead. Newly dead-- such an odd turn of phrase-- and buried under a mound that is even now slaking its first taste of rain. Father says, "She was so beautiful. The moon was up-- she was like silver and gold. We went out back of the barn and I thought she was an angel, 'cause she had her own light." A long, healthy swallow of liquor. "She wasn' an angel. Not ah proper one, she wasn' right." Sidelong glance at Ianto, young and lost in the maelstrom of adolescent grief, "Jus' like you ain' right." )_

What comes next? Ianto laughs to himself, because he's telling two stories at once. What happened was this; Mam had the baby and, fifteen years later, Ianto swung and clocked his father in the jaw on that rainy morning.  
"I hate you," he'd told his father, words acidic with truth.  
Vaughn had shrugged, jaw swelling and unnoticed, "Don' take it personal." But it wasn't that-- it had been the words before the insult. The revelation that, if only for an hour or so, if only for a night, Father had thought Mam to be an angel.  
"You killed her," Ianto had said, walking backwards into the muddy driveway. "You know it to, and you're not sorry. You're a murderer."  
"Queer thing, you are," Father had muttered, continued to mutter as Ianto turned and loped off into the forest. "Not right-- but she had her own glow, and I just..."

Ianto has backed himself into a corner, thinking about this. He tries not to, most days; he restricts himself to the inbetween times, those still-photo memories of himself and Mam, living their quiet lives, together alone. Beginnings and endings are always violent-- he knows that from his own experience now-- it's the middle of the story, the eye the storm, that matters when everyone else is gone. Himself and Mam in her sewing room-- the hum of her work and the low radio, himself at the little card table, drawing or reading, or driving his little silver matchbox car along invisible roads. Summer in the garden, up to their elbows in dirt, while the forest watched and giggled. There's nothing else there, nothing but the Father's brief and sometimes baleful interruptions. Just him, and Mam, and maybe he was a little lonely and had a few imaginary friends.  
That's the real story-- he's not just changing it because he wants to.  
_(He __**can't**__ be.)_

Presently, in the dim lights of Jack's office, Ianto sits on the antique couch and slowly, absently catalogues the contrast of hub metal and smooth, old-fashioned wood. Functional technology; graceful lines. It's a study in contradictions that somehow fit together, make more of themselves than their parts. Every bit of Ianto aches, and he fights the urge to simply curl in on himself and collapse. Self-consciously, his body squirms in the long-sleeve shirt and sweats Owen gave him. He feels out of place, as if Brecon Beacons is still sliding along his skin, a sick and cancerous oil. What he needs is the clean press and lines of his suits, everything squared away and smoothed out. He's almost convinced himself to get up-- to hell with take-out and Owen's stupid pills-- and change; he'll just go home, or down to the vaults, and find something to do until dawn breathes and makes the Beacons seem like a nightmarish fever dream.   
"Don't move, Jones," Jack's voice prompts Ianto's body before it even registers with his mind. He sits back down, an involuntary smile lifting as Jack finishes with a bad gangster impression; "We got the place surrounded, boy."  
Ianto runs a somewhat sheepish hand through his hair, "I was just--"  
"Going to sneak off?" Jack asks, brandishing a bottle of Vat 69. "Finish eating and take your pills. Assuming the apocalypse doesn't descend upon us, I've given everyone the day off tomorrow. That way, you won't disappear into the archives, or decide to give Myfanwy a bath." There's a knowing look behind Jack's smile and wink, and Ianto feels the blush cover his face no matter how hard he tries to will it away. That beautiful bastard-grin just gets wider, "Consider yourself thwarted."

There's a healthy does of sarcasm in Ianto's 'Yes, sir', and they descend into a companionable silence. It's a comfort and familiarity that Ianto feels guilty about, even as he relishes it. How quickly they all forgot about Lisa, playing their stupid summer camp games! And yet, here he is, gratefully absorbing the peace of Jack's presence, accepting (here comes Yvonne's disapproving tone) aid and comfort from the enemy. Lord, he'd been starting to think he'd never feel this way again, like they were here and alive and okay, like Jack's hands were on him because that's just where they wanted to be.  
"Hey," Jack says. And there it is, a touch on his elbow, and another very brief one on his waist, as the Captain takes a seat beside him. He's unwrapping the pills from the napkin, pressing them into Ianto's hand. "I'm usually the last person to lean on pharmaceuticals for relief--" a nod towards the Vat 69, "but you look like you're in a lot of pain."  
"It hurts... there's nothing that doesn't hurt," Ianto admits. He could lean into Jack now, if he let himself, if he didn't think he'd hear Lisa's mournful, betrayed voice in his dreams. Ianto hates pills, but he swallows these before he can think about it any longer, and allows Jack to lift a glass of water to his lips. He dozes a little, feels Jack carefully rearrange his limbs so he can sleep.

"Rest," Jack's voice is like a caress, following Ianto down into the darkness. He thinks he hears, or imagines, or remembers, Jack say, "I've got you" and then he is dreaming. There's the village river, churning white and gray, and a young (four? five?) Ianto stands above it on the stone bridge, listening to the silver girl cry and the forest in which his tree-friends weep (_laugh?_) and gnash their teeth. He watches the water, watches it moving, and takes a step off the ledge while Jack's impassioned, panicked voice tells him no, no, no.

* * *

**TO BE CONTINUED**


	5. HERE AND NOW 3: Ex Parte

**NOTES:**It should be noted that I am really, really nervous about posting this. I doubt if anyone remembers this fic, but I started it back in October, and hit a roadblock in December. I haven't written anything since February, but when the bug finally bit me again, it was this story that came to mind. "Small Worlds" is still one of my favorite Torchwood eps, story-wise, and season two only made me swoon over Ianto more. I revised some of my plot plans in light of season two, but really, this chapter is pretty much as I planned it in my head back in January. I just couldn't get it out. XX;; I just really hope the break isn't jolting or noticable, and... yeah. I'm only making myself more nervous, so I think I'll shut up.  
I would like to thank you for bothering to read my story. If I could trouble you a bit more for feedback, I'd be ever so grateful!

* * *

_**Certain For the Dead 5/?**  
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory_

* * *

**HERE AND NOW III: Ex Parte**

Owen Harper no longer wakes as he once did, awareness spiraling out from the seat of intellect, into his limbs and extremities, and finally to the world around his stirring form. Instead, he wakes like a soldier in a foxhole; a reluctant sleeper in hostile territory. And isn't that what the whole world is, now? To say nothing of his bed, the contents of which are first to come to his groggy attention. Since Katie's death, the doctor has shared his bed with scores of partners. The wide, red-swathed mattress has been battlefield and anesthetic room; he has sucked and stroked and touched and petted before his high, night-darkened windows. Always, he fixes his eyes on the far line of the bridge over the quay for that critical moment, thinking desperately, '_This is a view Katie has never seen'. _  
Morning-afters are even less pretty.

As he comes to consciousness now, Owen is aware of two things-- the firm, smooth swell of flesh under his hand, and the incessant, tinny whine of his mobile. The phone is in the pocket of his jeans, somewhere halfway across the room. Perception and memory come back, but they don't override self-preservation. He is cautious, movements slow and planned as he rises, carefully removing his hand from the curve of Gwen Cooper's pale behind. She is all white skin and dark hair, arms akimbo as she lets out a heavy sigh of deep sleep. As she settles, Owen takes in the small, perpetual frown marring her features. '_She even pouts in her dreams!'_ he thinks, and stifles the urge to laugh. The mobile is still going-- no ringtone, just the harsh, insistent ring set for one caller and one caller only. He doesn't have to glance at the LCD screen to know it reads TORCHWOOD. Instead, he picks up the tangle of jeans and underwear wholesale, jogging down the hall. Naked on the stairwell, he fumbles and finally flips the phone open, muttering.  
"What in fuck's sake do you want, Harkness?" he half-snarls. There hadn't been barest of light on the horizon, and a quick glance at the clock above the telly tells him its just shy of four am. "You said we had the bloody day off!" Even now, Owen's mind shies from the events of the past forty-eight hours, working at odd angels and tangents to avoid the thought of Brecon Beacons. His heart and stomach lurch together, and its like fresh swath of blood along his organs. Like the heat that rises from infected flesh.  
"Owen." Just like that, Jack's voice cuts across the line-- somehow, it bypasses Owen's brain and halts the complaint already forming on his tongue. "I need to know what you gave Ianto last night." Disgusted, Owen shakes his drawers free of his jeans, turning them rightside out and pulling on both in turn.  
"Whaddaya mean?" the doctor asks, perplexed. "I gave everyone a lot of things last night-- I was practically running my own snodd'n A&E! I gave Tosh and Ianto locals so I could do the stitches, tetanus shots, took blood for testing--"  
"The pills!" Jack says matching and trumping Owen's aggravated tone. "I need to know what pills you gave him. He said he asked you to cut down the dosage because they made him ill."  
"What, teaboy's a little woozy, so he wants to blame me?! They were sedatives, Jack. We all needed them, for god's sake."

There's a pause, brief but pregnant, in which Owen has just enough time to regret using his own derogatory little pet name for Jones. Even that small pang of trauma-inspired camaraderie can do nothing to prepare him to the utter chill that comes over the line.  
"Harper." It's the merciless hand of winter, that voice-- as hard and comforting as the marble they use for tombs. "The names. of the. drugs."  
"They were sleep aids and painkillers," Owen says, hating the way his voice sounds like that of a boy finally spitting something out to the headmaster. "I'm a doctor, Jack-- the only thing of any note was the Anthoxopam. That's--"  
At what point does freezing become fire? Jack's voice is flat and oh-so-cold, past zero and into the land of sunless, dark moons. "The drug designed by Torchwood One." The sound of a deep breath, "That fascist bitch."  
"What do you mean?" He's raking a hand through his hair now, throwing himself down on the sofa and staring, sightlessly, up at his own unremarkable white ceiling. "It's the perfect pharmaceutical, Jack. It doesn't interact with any other medication, no matter what the patient is taking; it builds up antibodies against three different non-terrestrial viruses. Hell, the prime minister has been looking into releasing it as a cure for the common cold!"  
"Goddamn it, if I'd known you had that poison here, I would have destroyed it myself."  
"It was in the stores when I joined up! Ianto's the one who gave me the files on it when I asked what it was!" Owen says, feeling less the schoolboy now. No, he was down to defensive child, bewildered and groping. Finally, the conversation penetrates past his intellectual assurance and the layers of his personal feelings (traitor traitor polite little sod) towards Ianto Jones. "Do you need me there? Is he alright?"  
"He will be," Jack says. ('_Marble,_' Owen thinks again, and shivers without realizing it.) "Don't worry. Enjoy your day off."

Just a click and then the dial tone. Owen stays still on the couch, head tilted back against the armrest as he stares at the now silent phone.  
"Oh, sure," he mutters. "'At ease, soldier,'" he mocks Jack's accent. "'Smoke 'em if you got 'em." Still groggy and more than a little punchy from the emotional conversation, Owen drifts, flicking the cellphone open and shut. Ianto Jones. Clean shaven, perfectly pressed, turned out like some perfect little butler and all the while seething, feeding and cosseting a monster right underneath their feet. 'I's crossed and 'T's dotted and, oh, did I mention I'm keeping my homicidal cyborg girlfriend in your basement? Of course not! And what was it all for?  
"A week's suspension, and the Captain still trying to fondle his wrists and make love to his coffee," Owen informs the blank television screen, tossing the mobile onto the low table. "Christ on a crutch." He glances at the clock again, weighing the effort of moving against the sweet relief of a beer. It's these dark, quiet hours he hates the most; even the air feels quiet and still, slowing the mad whirl at the center of his mind.

Once he used these hours to study-- put the telly on mute and let the flickering light flash over his textbooks while Katie slept peaceful (_dead_) and unfettered by his side. Or they quizzed each other, drinking endless rounds of soda as they blinked and rubbed at their eyes, trying to prepare for their practicals. In these predawn hours, it does not matter that Katie never set foot in this apartment, or in the city of Cardiff at all. The safety of the sleek and impersonal decor (so different from their cozy London flat) dissolves; he can picture her here, and she haunts him. His eyes are closed before he realizes it, and now there's nothing for it. If he opens them again, he'll see her, perched on the arm of the sofa in that gaudy pink shirt she liked to sleep in. '_Real men date forensic anthropologists_'-- that one always had tickled her so. And oh, it's merciless, it's completely unfair, but he can almost feel the over-washed fabric beneath his fingers, as if you can grab hold and pull Katie (_it's sense memory, ya big bugger-all, just memory_) close. He'll feel her slight hips and firm breasts-- Gwen's had been too small, they'd left room in his hands-- she'll tell him _it's okay, baby, open your eyes._  
"It's not, and I'm not," Owen says aloud. He wants Brecon Beacons now; longs for the moldering houses and gutted monsters with the faces of men. Fear is easy, anger too. The Beacons were awful, a lucid nightmare, but nothing will ever be as poisonous as the hope he will someday wake up and Katie will be okay.  
_"Don't you think that's how he feels?" _ Katie asks in his mind. That quiet voice, her pillow-talk one, stretching between them more intimate than skin-on-skin. Attached to this echo is a frighteningly detailed image of Ianto, sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest in the dark debris of the Hub. Rocking there in his expensive trousers, soaking in dirty water and bits of his own girlfriend's flesh. And Jack said, _"You have to shoot her. Shoot her, Ianto, before I do it for you." _ He can almost feel Katie's arms around him, now, light yet real. Her touch is comforting, but her words are not. "  
"_I think,"_ says this ghost, this malfunctioning cluster of neurons in Dr. Harper's masochistic brain. _"I think you hate Ianto because you're so much alike."_

"That's it!" Owen says, barely restraining himself from shouting. "Self-analysis is not healthy! Self-understanding is not healthy!" He shoots up from the sofa, making a beeline for the relative safety of the kitchen. The little digital clock on the microwave mocks him with its late-night numbers, but the beer is right there, it's handy in the cupboard. Stored right at eye-level, for the budding alcoholic Owen's been playing at. The snap of the can opening is satisfyingly loud in the stillness, Owen chugs and feels it rush towards his empty stomach. Oh well, what the hell. He should probably be able to write off his beer consumption as a work-related expense.  
_(Ianto, frowning at him, insisting drinks purchased while staking out clubs for their literally illegal alien are not covered in the supply budget.)_ "And all the while, she was down there." The cyberwoman (_Lisa_), waiting, recharging. That spore, lodged in the soft tissue of Katie's brain, feeding and growing, stealing her away even before her body died. This just doesn't seem to be Owen's night.  
_Wouldn't you have done the same for me?"_ asks Katie. He pictures her leaning against the counter, chin in her hands. Those dark-brown eyes and her too-narrow chin."_If you had known? If you had the chance?_" Oh, it's pitch-perfect, but it's not Katie, because she would never ask that question. Owen finishes the beer, knocking it into the sink, and opens another. He's torturing himself-- he must be-- because only his own memories could conjure Katie so well. The smell of beer is thick in his nostrils, but there's something else there too, now. Hot house flowers; overwhelming and red even in the olfactory sense.  
"Here's a better question," Owen argues with himself. "How about, 'Why does Hartman's wonder-drug, the pride of Torchwood One, make our little Jonesy-boy so sick?'" Not a question he would have bothered over too much, save in a strictly professional sense. Might have mulled over it when he returned to work, accepted whatever Jack passed it off as. Now, however, it's a thorn in his paw, and he'll pick until it bleeds, because it's a puzzle. Because Katie wore peach blossom perfume, nothing like these exotic, phantom blooms.  
"Anthoxopam is perfect. Perfect enough for parliament, perfect enough for Hartman-- which is saying something." And the Jack he'd spoken to on the phone had been livid-- no give, no laughter, no compromise. A ranting Jack was just an indulgent drama queen, making a scene to get his point across. It was a quiet Jack was the dangerous one; Captain Harkness, with no trace of the friendly Boss. The kind of man who smiled at an eater of human flesh, and asked if it wanted to help him brush up on his torture.

For a long time, Owen considers these things, chewing his lip and occasionally sipping from what is now his third can of beer. He turns them over in his mind, the way a child does with blocks, picturing all the ways they might fit together. What pieces might be missing. The sun begins to barely brush the horizon with false dawn, and Owen ruminates on his safely academic puzzle, while Gwen lays in his bed upstairs, sleeping off her guilt. In her flat across town, Tosh wakes up screaming-- turns her head swiftly into the pillow so as not to wake the neighbors. She's left her bedroom lights on all night, unable to bear the thought of waking and not being able to identify her surroundings in the dark. And Jack, panicked and unable to admit the full extent of it to himself, sweeps pill bottles off their perches in a cascade of destruction. Owen's autopsy bay is littered with multicolored capsules; Ianto Jones lies on the sofa in the Captain's office, breathing shallowly and dreaming of Jack saying _no no no_.

Full dawn will come. Gwen will rise, finding herself alone, and gather her things. Owen will see her in the stairwell and think, for one insane and grotesque moment, 'Why is Katie wearing Gwen's clothes?'. They'll murmur vaguely to each other, and Rhys Williams will wake up to find that Gwen has made him breakfast-- all the fixings-- while he was sleeping. Blinking and guilty, Toshiko will call her grandmother's cellphone with a rerouted number, and listen to the older woman's voice on the recording, never leaving a message at all.  
There will be four cans of beer in Owen's dry sink-- dead soldiers, as they sometimes say. There will be rose petals, too, the vibrant red of those just picked, laying near the drain. They won't be there when he wakes again, of course, but that doesn't matter. His dreams will be of Katie, asking him if he would not have done the same for her, and he will not under why she's laughing.

The damage has already been done.

* * *

TO BE CONTINUED  
(and remember, leading scientists now believe feedback to be more powerful than nuclear energy! ) 


	6. THERE AND THEN 3:Sounds From Down Stream

* * *

  
**_Certain For the Dead 6/?_**  
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory

/  


* * *

**THEN AND THERE (III): Sounds From Downstream**

Jack Harkness had every intention of driving all the way back to Cardiff from Porthcawl, without stopping. The expediency was one of the rare benefits of not sleeping-- in some ways, he was looking forward to the long, silent drive. The job in Porthcawl had been dull, classified as a 'red-herring' in the eyes of his current Torchwood superiors, but many of the Doctor's mad-cap trademarks had lingered amidst the lack of evidence, leaving a hollow little bubble in between Jack's ribs. Loneliness ready to pop, burst like a blood-vessel in a way he sometimes wished could be fatal. He had no desire to be amongst people until the feeling had passed.

It would be hard to say, later, what exactly made him stop that day. Thunderheads gathered unseasonably as he navigated the country roads, but Jack didn't see them. His gaze was turned inward, so that he barely registered the little carved wood sign informing of passage near a little village called Camden Bright. He saw no signs of the outpost itself-- only the verdant, savage green of the ancient forests, trees and leaves shuddering under April's fickle hand. There came, eventually, a little prickle of warning, the mental equivalent of goose bumps at the back of the neck. The feeling of something moving in ones bones, a somehow instinctive distrust of reality that makes the lights too bright and the mirrors into liars. _'Someone just walked over my grave,_' Jack thought, bitterness and the taste of his own heart heavy on his tongue. He felt it intensely; so intensely that it took him a moment to realize that his feelings of loss and betrayal had merged with someone else's. Like a small boat lifted by a massive wave, he felt a dull sort of shock at the emotional intertwining-- and perhaps that, even more than instinct, was what surprised him into stopping the car.

Very much alert now, Jack pulled to the side of the dirt road and stepped out of his borrowed vehicle. The forest around him was greedy and relentless-- underbrush and greenery started less than three steps from the actual road, as if laying in wait. The trees, tall and silent as stone sentinels, obscured much of the sky, but Jack could taste the lingering rain and thunder, which had not been there moments before. He stood there for a few heartbeats, feeling a little silly yet willing himself to listen. There was an urge, too strong for him to trust, to get back in the car and continue driving, for surely there was nothing of note here. Jack fought past it, and encountered once more the vibrant heartbreak that had, for a moment, felt like his own. One step forward, then another-- faster now, and he began to jog along the ride of the road in the same direction he'd been heading all along. The empathic call was not as strong as many Jack had felt. In his own time, it would have been considered standard requirement to register with a guild but, in the 20th century, it was like finding a smooth ruby amidst river silt. (_RIVER_) Still moving, Jack tilted his head a little, filtering through his own thoughts.

_(river river motion of water light on the water on the ceiling of a cave river underground oh time like a river)_

The cascade of images bled over him-- not a call or signal at all, but the untrained leaking of someone whose mental biology was a few evolutionary jumps a head of the norm. There were telepaths and empaths, even telekenetics, in Earth's 20th Century-- Jack had met a considerable number in his long tour with Torchwood-- but they were still very much a biological sport. This one was understandably untrained, and young. The despair crested, shading into a sullen sort of resolve, and Jack realized he could hear the river along with the images in his minds eye. A few meters ahead, the road gave way to a stone bridge; Jack came to its center and stopped, casting a wide mental net. Over the stone wall, he could see that 'river' was really too grand a word-- the waterway was narrow but swift, echoing under the archway. He stared hard at the rushing stream; there was a smaller stone footbridge a little ways down, and he _knew_ there was something he wasn't supposed to see. He thought he heard laughter, that of many children; the smell of red, red flowers was almost overwhelming. For a moment, it was so complete that he could feel the heat of the box car, hear the laughter of those young and doomed soldiers.

'_I know you're here_,' he thought towards the entities in the woods, and his anger seemed to clear his sight. There, where the land slopped down from the footbridge to the banks of swift current-- _there!_ Jack was moving before he fully registered what he'd seen; a little boy, standing ankle deep in the cold creek, staring sightlessly towards where the water ran under the bridge.

It took the Captain several minutes to fight past the grass and brush, but the child did not move, or give any hint that he heard Jack's less-than-subtle descent along the hill. He was a slight little thing in a sky-blue jumper; his dark hair had that fine, uncut look of very young children. Some steps away, Jack came across a pair of tiny shoes set carefully aside, socks tucked in with their mates.  
"Hey!" he called out, making a bid for cheerful even as the child's intense emotions brushed against him like strong, unseen wind. This close, he could see that the boy had rolled up his trousers-- the water splashed along his little legs, and he stood just a few feet from where the current and depths would increase considerably. It couldn't be a very deep river, Jack thought, but that wouldn't matter for someone so small. The boy stood still a carving of ice, hands balled into fists at his sides. Around them, the trees seemed to laugh and chortle, and the sky filled with heavy, pregnant clouds. "Hey, kiddo!" Jack said again, stopping just short of reaching out to touch the boy. The sorrow was almost palpable, filling Jack's mind with strong colors.

_(WHITE sheets everywhere there are white sheets.  
It's a bad hospital, there's RED paint and that's bad. So hot and all the crying, she's crying, she's saying my name. SILVER, silver on the dark, on her pretty dark skin and RED, red is bad bad red. Noise and fire and she hurts so much.)_

Oh, the agony was far too mature for a boy to feel. This child was soaking the emotion up and rebroadcasting it, the signal only strengthened by his wild, uncomprehending fear.  
_'Why are you showing him this?' _ Jack wondered at the Elementals, the so-called dancing faeries of children's stories. _'Where is it coming from?' _ No answers from the ancient powers, but the boy turned his head, becoming aware of Jack for the first time.

"It comes from Forward," he said carefully forming each word. There were tracks running down his reddened cheeks, but Jack could see that he wasn't really crying. Rather, the tears were welling in his eyes and overflowing, without him ever being aware of it. In that small, agonized expression, the eyes were very, very blue. "It comes from down stream."  
_(time is a river the sound of the river like the sound of their feet their marching the bad mens are marching on little tin soldiers oh she hurts so much, so much)_  
"It hasn't happened yet," Jack agreed, stepping into the water without really thinking about it. He stopped when the boy took an instinctive step back. Trying his best to sound soothing, he added, "It might not happen at all." It was the wrong thing to say-- the boy nodded eagerly. Too eagerly.  
"They say so too!" So young, unquestioning, that smile.  
"Who?" Jack asked carefully, aware of the rustling behind him.  
"My tree friends." Said simply with no guile.  
"Ah," he murmured, and thunder rolled in the distance. He gestured widely with his hand, feeling the April chill as the wind picked up. The child felt it too, his whole body shivering. He grinned a little, "Nice weather we're having."  
"They do that," the boy said, seeming to lose interest. He looked away, his gaze riveted on the arch of the stone bridge. Over the sound of childish laughter and threatening rain, a cry came to Jack's ears. Distant, but as real as the sudden smell of burning flesh permeating the area.  
_('help me!' says the silver girl. 'ianto please it hurts i need the shot it hurts hurts hurts')_

"Ianto?" Jack called out, reaching towards the child. "Is that your name?"  
"Yes." Those blue eyes turned on him once more-- the voice so young that the affirmative came out sounding like 'yis'.  
"That's a neat trick your friends have, Ianto," he offered his hand, making sure the boy saw it. "I bet they have lots of tricks."  
"Lots, yep," and Ianto popped the 'p' at end, as if for emphasis. "My teacher says the clock goes like this--" he twirled his finger clockwise, as illustration-- "but my tree-friends make it go diff'ernt. They make it go both ways. Make doors go places they shouldn't."  
"And archways, too, I bet." Jack had the gist of it now, and he barely managed to restrain the rage in his gut. Here was this child, this bright, naturally polished treasure; he'd seen Elementals tempt and coax, and this must be where it went when that didn't work. Down from the future, they had brought echoes of something horrifying, like a closet monster laying in wait, and... Look, Ianto! A magic door to get you out.  
"It goes some place," Ianto agreed. It came out sounding like 'sum-pace'. "I don't want her to hurt." He looked at Jack with depths of fathomless blue. The eyes of an old soul. "I can save her."

Oh, some day, those words will haunt Jack. They will burrow into his mind while he sleeps, horrible, red little echoes, and he will see that same face streaked with tears. The little boy and the young man, both despairing beyond any actual use of the word, pleading with an inflexible universe. Jack will lock his jaw, steel himself to remain unmoved, and Ianto will say he will not, he can not, it will tear along Jack's heart. Make him as merciless, as inflexible as the black universe itself.

And maybe there was a hint of that, then; certainly, Jack felt an uncomfortable doubling around him, as if time had folded in on itself. His head pounded, there was bile in his throat. It was April of 1987, and his hand hung between himself and the little boy he'd just met.  
"No, Ianto." He took another step forward, emboldened when the boy did not move.  
_'You can't trust him!' _ hissed the trees. '_He's a stranger!'_  
"I..." Ianto wavered, beginning to breathe heavily.  
"They play lots of tricks, don't they, Ianto?" Jack insisted, ignoring the insults. "Some of them are fun, really neat. But I'd bet some of them aren't so much fun." Ianto blinked rapidly, and he knew he'd hit a nerve. "You know it's not nice to laugh at a friend when they fall down."  
A very small voice agreed with him, "Not nice at all."  
Here was this tiny boy, trying to shoulder a black grief that bent and consumed a grown man. The compassion on Jack's face was real as he added, "It's even more not-nice to push them, don't you think?"  
"Uh-huh..."  
"Take my hand, Ianto."  
_(take my hand, he added soothingly, a mental echo of his words. safe friendly we'll go home take my hand now)_  
"I..." The child turned back to towards the archway, where the sounds of a woman's tearful pleading were still strong.  
"No!" Jack shouted, surprised by the vehemence of his own voice. More softly, "No." He took two more steps in the shallow water, knowing the final choice had to be made by the boy himself. "Come on, Ianto. It's cold out here. I'll take you home."  
"Mam's at home," Ianto said wonderingly, as if grappling with a foreign idea. "Mam said I could play in the garden, and then _they_ said to come play, come an' play a game."  
"I don't like this game," Jack said honestly.  
_"Thief! Thief!" _ came the voices in the wind and in the leaves. "_Liar and thief!"_  
"You're not a'posed to CALL NAMES!" Ianto shouted suddenly, turning towards the trees. "It's NOT NICE!" Anger and confusion were plain on his face, but they were a _child's _ anger and confusion, and Jack knew the spell had-- for the moment, at least-- been broken. "S'not _polite_," Ianto informed Jack, finally placing his tiny hand in Jack's wide palm.

The Captain wasted no time in picking the child up and-- almost stumbling in his haste-- climbing onto the weed-strewn shore. He scooped up the boy's shoes and socks with one hand, carefully balancing Ianto on his hip.  
"Oh, no," Ianto said, just moments before the clouds loosed thwarted rage, pelting them both with cold rain. Jack made for the relative shelter of the woods, pulling his greatcoat protectively over the already shivering child.  
"Which way is home?" Jack asked, even as he saw the small but clearly beaten path through the woods. Ianto peaked over his lapel, making a general motion with one hand. "Up th'hill." He reached up, placing his cool palms on either side of Jack's face. For a moment, the older man stopped, regarding the child in his arms. "You saved me," Ianto said, frowning. "I'm not to swim in the little river, Mam says, 'cause itll pull me all the way out to Ogmore, the Big River. It's dang'rous."  
"Your Mam is very right," Jack agreed, rubbing the child's back.  
"But _they_ said..." Now Ianto was crying for himself, fat tears that made his face scrunch as if he could escape the facts. "_They're _ my friends!" he insisted, half sobbing. "They've never played like that before! That was mean!"  
"Hey, buddy," the Captain tucked Ianto against him, "s'okay."  
"I want to go home," Ianto said with almost regal petulance, muffled somewhat by the coat. "And home is where I shall take you," Jack stated firmly. Already, he thought he heard a voice-- a real voice-- calling out. When he reached a small fork in the path, he was sure of it.

As the hill angled up, the clearing of weeds became a makeshift dirt-and-plank set of steps, leading up out of the woods and into the now calm, beautiful spring day. A female figure wavered precariously there, trying to descend in such haste that she nearly tumbled and had to right herself twice.  
"Careful!" Jack cautioned. "It's okay! I've got him!" As she neared, he saw that the woman was really a girl. A slight creature, brown eyes wide as a startled doe, and the shape of her tearstained face had many angles and curves to match that of the boy in Jack's arms.  
"Ianto Gareth Jones!" she cried, nearly stumbling again as she rushed forward. Her wisps of her short hair failed to obscure her frightened expression, and that relief which does not quite yet believe.  
Ianto greeted her with a cry of his own, reaching out eagerly. "Mam! Oh, Mam!" Jack started a little as he watched them embrace; the girl covered Ianto's face with kisses even as she swatted at his behind.  
"Oh, you naughty boy!" she said helplessly, laughing and crying. "You scared me! You did scare your Mam so!"  
"Sorry, sorry," Ianto muttered, taking fistfuls of her yellow jumper. "I didn't mean to, Mam, I was s'posed to stay in the garden, I know."  
"Exactly!" The girl-- Ianto's mother! Jack thought with self-effacing surprise-- was trying for stern, but couldn't keep from hugging her child again. "You won't be going out unattended for some time, that's for sure!"  
"_They_ said," Ianto began, even as she placed a silencing finger to his lips. For the first time, she lifted her gaze and truly _looked _ at Jack, taking a deep, shuddering breath.

"_They_ lied, Ianto," Jack said, kneeling beside mother and child. He watched the girl's face carefully-- saw her eyes widen, and her chin lift. There was youth in that defiant tilt, as well as motherly combativeness. Her pale and freckled cheeks drained of color, even as she set her jaw.  
"Captain Jack Harkness." Delivered with his most charming smile. "At your service."  
"Amser Jones," she said, picking Ianto up. Jack stood as well-- she was barely taller than his shoulder, and Ianto took the opportunity to nestle against her neck as she looked up at the stranger. "You've met my son, Ianto." Briefly, her expression thawed, became as open and earnest as a summer flower. "_Thank you_, for finding him. I thought I was going to lose my mind." She snorted, becoming guarded once more. "You must think I'm a terrible mother, but he never wanders. We have a little garden, and I thought he could use the exercise after all the rotten weather we've been having." She tapped the boy's shoulder reproachfully, "You'll just be lucky if I let you out of my sight again before you're thirty, mister man!"  
"I think you're a fine mother," Jack said comfortingly. In his own mind, he pictured the girl washing the dishes or seeing to some other household chore. Working up a rhythm as she folded laundry, becoming oddly engrossed, almost _mesmerized_as the 'tree-friends' lured her son away. In the same way he'd fought to be able to see the boy by the footbridge, she would have had to fight her way out from under that strong absorption, to go and check on her boy. She could have even seen him playing outside the window as he'd been scampering down these very wooden steps.

Amser rolled her eyes, shaking the hair away from her face. "That's refreshingly charitable. At least he didn't wander far. Our yard starts at the top of these old steps."  
"He was down by your river," Jack told her. He reached out to pat Ianto's back, clearly telegraphing the move before hand, so she could decide if she would allow it. She did, but squeezed the boy tightly, biting her pale lips. Carefully, the Captain added, "I think his '_friends_' wanted him to go swimming." Several emotions flickered over Amser's face, like water moving under solid ice. Ianto picked them up naturally, instictively boosting what he had divined.  
_(caution fear and he knows how can he know when i'm not even sure i do, tred soft, tred careful, keep it simple careful, fear)_  
"Beg pardon, Captain Harkness," she said with equal care, "but Ianto doesn't have any friends that live close by. I take him to nursery school in the village, but he doesn't have any playmates out here. You must be mistaken." She sighed heavily, pressing a kiss into Ianto's hair. The boy himself was watching Jack's face, thumb shoved in his mouth as he rubbed his cheek against his Mam's soft sweater. "Really, I do thank you for finding him. I'd invite you up to the house, but..." A pause, before she decided on, "It wouldn't look well. It was good of you to find him, before someone from the village."  
"I see," Jack said, and he was just beginning to. He might have been surprised by the girl's youth, but that was all. It had been purely academic, taken in the context of his mental catalogue of "Wales, 1980's", for he'd lived in times when mothers had come far younger than the present Mrs. Jones. '_Context is deadly,_' ; a professor at the Time Agency had been fond of saying that, and it was true. Aware of his scrutiny, Amser brushed invisible lint off long her denim skirt, seemingly willing to wait him out. Instead of commenting, Jack held Ianto's shoes and socks out to her, like a peace offering.

"Thank you," she said again, turning swiftly. Ianto lifted his head to peer over her shoulder, watching Jack with those ocean-blues.  
"_They_ are not just going to let this go," Jack kept his voice firm. "This has been going on for a while, if it's gotten this extreme. I've seen it before!"  
"Please," Amser glanced back at him, back stiff. "Don't make trouble for me, sir. I can't afford it."  
"You love your son?"  
"More than heaven and earth," she responded, without taking a breath.  
Jack said, "They'll take him from you."  
She was climbing the steps as quickly as she dared, now. Words wafted behind her, ominous. "Over my dead body, they will." Solemnly, Ianto stopped suckling his thumb, lifting that hand to wave at Jack over his mother's shoulder.

In his soaked boots and wet coat, Jack stood in the unfriendly forest and could only wave back.

* * *

puppy dog eyes See that lonely 'reply' button down there? It wants you to press it. Go on, press. You know you want to!


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